When the second half of the 19th century began, South Africa was barely even a geographical expression, as Metternich had contemptuously called Italy. It certainly wasn’t a country, but merely an ill-defined area which included two Boer republics, the Transvaal and the Orange Free State, two British colonies, the Cape and Natal, and a number of African principalities. The British had acquired the Cape from the Dutch during the Napoleonic wars not quite in a fit of absence of mind, but with little enthusiasm, and although the Cape of Good Hope itself was of great strategic importance, commanding the passage to India and the Far East, James Stephen of the Colonial Office unpresciently called the lands of the interior ‘the most sterile and worthless in the whole Empire’.
Everything was changed by geology, or by its accidental interaction with human history. Just as it’s a random fact of life, but full of significance for all of us, that Shiites, although only a one-in-five minority among Muslims as a whole, happen to sit on top of most of the world’s oil, so a capricious Providence decided to place most of the world’s diamonds and gold beneath the bush and desert south of the Tropic of Capricorn. How this changed the whole course of South African — and to no small extent world — history is the enthralling story told by Martin Meredith in Diamonds, Gold and War.
First came the rush to Griqualand, where immensely rich diamond pipes were found in 1871. Diggers flooded in and created a vast patchwork of little claims. After feuding and rebellion, a few men, led by Cecil Rhodes, Alfred Beit and Barney Barnato, gradually established control of the mines, while the British ruthlessly acquired what had been a disputed territory. The diamond town was now named Kimberley, for the Colonial Secretary of the time (which is why American girls are still called, at third hand, after the Norfolk village whence the Wodehouse family took their title).
If the diamonds had lain in a debatable land, the immense gold field discovered in 1886 did not. ‘The ridge of white water’ — Witwatersrand — belonged to the Transvaal, or South African Republic, a statelet of sorts created by Dutch-speaking Boers escaping northwards from British rule. Incomers came in large numbers to the Rand and its new boom town called Johannesburg, which was soon producing an immense output of gold, and which was soon also in a state of unarmed revolt against the Transvaal.
But there was a fascinating difference between these two mining business, of which Meredith could have made more. In both cases a cartel was established, but with diametrically opposite purposes. Although Kimberley fuelled the great new fashion for engagement rings, the demand for diamonds was essentially artificial, and with such a limitless and easily mined supply the price fluctuated wildly, often plunging downwards. And so the answer for the mine owners was monopoly in the strict sense of a sellers’ market, controlling production and thus keeping up the price.
By contrast, from the early 18th century until the Great War the price of gold was fixed by the gold standard. The Rand was incomparably the greatest gold field ever found in terms of quantity, but its quality was very poor, so that in order to make the field payable, as mining managers say, costs had to be controlled by means of monopsony, a buyers’ market for the crucial commodity of labour, whose price could be kept down. It is not too much to say that from these financial and geological facts the whole history of modern South Africa flows.
Throughout the 1890s the Randlords, the mine owners, chafed under the regime of Paul Kruger. In 1895 Rhodes promoted the disgraceful Jameson Raid with the help of the brutally unprincipled Joseph Chamberlain, now Colonial Secretary. Far from learning restraint from the failure of the Raid, Chamberlain sent out as High Commissioner Alfred Milner, a different brand of villain, who colluded with Rhodes to bring about the Boer war in 1899. Meredith gives one of the best accounts I have read of how this was done, a scoundrelly business which has few parallels in British history, apart from the way we were taken into the Suez escapade and the present Iraq war, and which no Englishman can read to this day without a sense of shame.
Militarily disastrous to begin with, morally calamitous at the end, the Boer war earned this country deep hatred throughout the world. But the way in which the British dealt with South Africa after the war was almost worse in terms of its longer effects. The wretched Milner tried to encourage large British immigration, supposing that a balance of three to two British to Boer among the white population would provide safety but that ‘if there are three Dutch to two of British, we shall have perpetual difficulty’ (he was right about that), while his oppressive and insulting treatment of those Dutch inflamed feeling, and may even have stimulated the growth of Afrikaans as a literary language.
In his eagerness to restore the mines to profitability, Milner fatefully allowed the introduction of dirt-cheap Chinese indentured labourers, with awful consequences both human and political. ‘Chinese slavery’ destroyed any British claim to moral superiority, although the haughty Milner could do no more than respond petulantly about ‘perpetual faultfinding, this steady drip, drip of deprecation, only diversified by occasional outbursts of hysterical abuse’. Then the black majority were deprived of almost all such rights as they had enjoyed before, a job thoroughly done by the time Meredith’s book ends with the creation of the Union of South Africa in 1910. What was called apartheid after 1948 was different in degree rather than kind from the previous system.
Much of this story, and plenty of the anecdotes, will be familiar to those of us who have read or indeed written books on the subject, but Martin Meredith has made good use not only of recent scholarly work but also of contemporary sources, some of which were unknown to me. The illustrations are also excellent, though why on earth is there no list of them after the contents page? He offers no striking new interpretation, but tells the story lucidly so that the reader can draw his own moral. It was the Boer war that inspired Kipling’s phrase ‘no end of a lesson’, but those words might be used of the whole story of South Africa since that day nearly 140 years ago when a few shiny pebbles were picked up besides a dry water-course in Griqualand.